


don't need no credit card to ride this train

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Feels, Fix-It, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 10:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11645037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peter gets a second chance to make a very important change.





	don't need no credit card to ride this train

**Author's Note:**

> For this prompt on Tumblr: _Time travel fix it prompt where Peter travels back in time to tell yondu that he was a goodish dad?_ Uh, so obviously I just kinda picked that up and ran with it ...
> 
> _Back to the Future_ came out in 1985, so Peter could easily have seen it. Title is from "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis  & the News, which is from the BTTF soundtrack.

Peter should have known there would be a catch if a buyer was willing to pay this much for a seemingly innocuous artifact retrieved from alien ruins. You'd think the entire thing with the orb would have taught him better, but no, like he'd once told Gamora, he just didn't learn. He'd told her it was one of his issues, and he was starting to think it was an issue he might want to think about working on.

All these thoughts went through his head in a flash when he deactivated the crystal's containment device with the gadget Rocket had made for him and the world went up in white light. He dimly heard Gamora and Drax both shouting his name, and for a single instant everything hurt like his whole body was on fire, and then --

And then he woke up.

Peter groaned. He was tangled in a not-so-clean blanket, and the dim gray blur in front of him slowly resolved into the familiar scarred metal wall of the Quadrant. He started to sit up and nearly banged his head on the low ceiling. 

This wasn't the cabin that he normally shared with Gamora. 

He blinked, looking around him, at the stripe of light on the wall from the partly open door by his elbow and the metal right above his head. Looked like they'd stuck him in one of the storage lockers for some stupid --

Wait.

His fingers were tangled up in a cord -- a very familiar cord. Peter felt his way up the cord to the foam-padded headphones around his neck, slipped down from when he'd fallen asleep listening to them, as he had every night for most of his childhood.

Last seen when Ego crushed his Walkman, shortly before Walkman, headphones, Ego and all went up in a really big explosion.

And this wasn't just _any_ storage locker. It was the one on the lower decks of the _Eclector_ that he'd slept in for the first couple of years he'd been on the ship. 

In the sliver of light coming in through the partly open door of the storage locker, he ran his fingers -- kid-sized fingers, weirdly tiny -- over the very familiar scratches on the dull gray metal. Here was the place where he'd started making a little scratch on the wall for every day he was on the ship (four scratches and then one through it, just like on TV) until he'd realized that he had no idea when a day started or ended, or whether a ship duty shift corresponded to an Earth day in any possible way. He had given up eight scratches into the project.

He was dreaming, obviously. This storage locker no longer existed, and he very definitely was no longer a kid. He was on a planet called Besaruu, probably stunned from getting zapped by the crystal. Hopefully the others weren't freaking out too badly. Hopefully, for that matter, _he_ wasn't too bad off, like in a coma or something --

The door of the locker was yanked open and too-bright light spilled into Peter's cozy hiding place. He let out an involuntary squawk.

"Get your ass out of bed, Quill," the enormous leather-jacketed presence looming over him growled, but all Peter could do was stare at him.

Yondu.

But of course, if he was dreaming about the _Eclector,_ Yondu would be in that dream. It wouldn't be the first time he'd dreamed about Yondu since everything that had happened on Ego's planet.

It was just so _real,_ right down to every buckle and stain on Yondu's long coat, down to the faint but sharp smell of hot metal that always hung around him, and all Peter could do was stare and try not to cry.

"Hell's the matter with you, boy?" Yondu swung an open blue palm at the back of his head, cuffing him -- not hard, but because he didn't try to duck, it snapped his head forward and brought tears to his eyes for a different reason. "Supposed to meet me in Bay 6 for fight trainin'. What'd I tell you if I had to come down all personal-like an' haul you out of bed one more time?"

"Probably something about kicking my ass," Peter said faintly, still staring.

"Get up, get your boots on, an' meet me there in two." Yondu spun around in a swirl of leather coat. "I have to come get you again, you won't like it."

Peter stared after him for a long moment, then pinched himself, hard.

"Ow," he muttered, looking down at the red mark on his arm, next to dirt smudges and bruises (most of the latter from Yondu's various forms of training, which had included things like kickboxing with no safety equipment and dangling him headfirst by the legs into air vents to teach him to pick locks upside down). "Okay, so, that doesn't prove anything. I'm in a coma, or I'm in some kind of sophisticated VR simulation ... Gamora?" he asked hesitantly, speaking to empty air. "Gamora, if you can hear me ... I'm okay? I think? Just, please get me out. Because this is really weird."

He slid out of the locker and dropped barefoot to the chill deck plates. He'd slept in most of his clothes, as usual when he was a kid -- nobody'd ever bothered to provide sleeping clothes for him, _he_ sure hadn't thought of it, and anyway, it made it much easier to deal with situations like this when he didn't have to take the time to dress. His kid-sized Ravager jacket (a little too long in the arms) and small boots were in the locker underneath the one he was sleeping in, sealed with a locking strip that opened to his thumbprint, stuffed in with the handful of other things that were his own, like his backpack and a couple changes of clothes.

Yondu had given him the lock, Peter remembered as he stamped into his boots -- had done it after he'd found Peter bruised and quietly crying in the engine room. It had been early in his time on the ship, the crew still hadn't figured out what to do with him, and Peter had gone after Horuz when the big asshole had stolen some of his stuff and dunked it in the toilet in the Deck 3 head. Peter had bitten Horuz, Horuz kicked him around some, and Yondu eventually found him curled around the items he'd recovered (just stupid stuff, a book he'd been reading for school that he didn't even like and a T-shirt, but it was _his,_ damn it).

Yondu had squatted down on his heels and looked at him for awhile, and Peter figured he was in for another ass-kicking and sullenly prepared to receive it, but instead, Yondu just quietly asked him what happened. Peter told him. And Yondu had shown him how to lock up his stuff, and that was that (though the self-defense lessons had started not long after that, come to think of it).

And at the speed he was going, he was going to be late. He locked the locker where he kept his stuff and the one where he slept, stuffed the Walkman in his pocket after running a reverent thumb over its embossed letters, and then he ran through the familiar corridors. His feet knew the way, and it was weird how _easy_ it was to run at this age. It was like he had all the energy in the world.

It was like he really was a little kid again, with a kid's boundless store of energy.

He _couldn't_ really be here. It wasn't possible. But it was just so detailed and real. The smells were right. The layout of the ship was right. He paused to swipe a finger across a grease smudge on the wall (it felt sticky) before he bounded into the cargo bay.

It was empty except for some crates and Yondu, who'd thrown his coat over a crate and was stretching. He looked up and grinned when he saw Peter, a sharp-toothed, feral grin. "You're late, boy," he said, and the bottom dropped out of Peter's stomach all over again at that familiar raspy voice. "C'mere." He jabbed a finger at a spot on the floor. "Stand there."

The flutter of nervousness in Peter's midsection was an old childhood habit, some half-remembered part of him bracing for the blows he knew were coming. But it was the adult in the child's body who walked cautiously over to stand in front of Yondu, and looked up at him (strange, to look so very _far_ up; he'd forgotten what a startling change it was, when he no longer had to look up to meet Yondu's eyes).

Without speaking, without warning, fast as a striking snake, Yondu swept a booted foot to kick his legs out from under him.

And Peter sidestepped, because they'd done this dance a million times, and jigged left instead of right because he recognized the tells for which direction Yondu's next blow was going to come from, then when Yondu shifted to compensate, Peter used a well-practiced defense and took it on his forearm. That knocked him back a step and sent a numbing shock up his arm; he wasn't used to being this small.

He was braced for more when he realized that Yondu had stepped back and was just staring at him. "What'n the heck," Yondu said slowly.

Oh. .... Right.

He was, from the look of his own small arms and legs, probably about nine or ten. He didn't really know how to fight yet. He didn't know how to do a lot of things.

He was fighting with twenty years' experience that this kid didn't have yet.

"Guess I paid attention to what you showed me," Peter said, deliberately lowering his arms a little bit and shifting his stance, making himself ball up his fists and hold them up like someone who didn't know quite how to fight.

"Guess you did," Yondu said, and the familiar crooked grin that spread across his face might as well have been an arrow to Peter's heart.

 

***

 

He was back on the fucking _Eclector_ and it was really, really weird.

"Gamora," he murmured as he wandered along the halls to the mess to feed his growling stomach, "Rocket, Kraglin ... hey, _guys,_ if I'm stuck in VR, pull me out soon, okay? This is super weird and I don't know how long I can handle it."

But as it turned out, being nine on the _Eclector_ was actually pretty easy for a grown-up Peter Quill. If he acted weird and a little dazed and kinda avoided people, that was probably more or less how he'd acted at that age before.

Actual days went by. He got a little more used to pretending to spar with Yondu like he didn't quite know what he was doing (sometimes going a little overboard with the play-acting and getting an extra cuff upside the head because "I just taught you that block last week; you got a brain in your head, boy?"); he settled back into the routines of shipboard life and had quiet conversations with Gamora and Rocket in the storage locker at night, just in case they could hear him.

It was awful and terrible and kind of amazing, and he wandered around the ship in a daze, and thought, thought, _thought_ about what he could do if this was real, and whether he was doomed to relive it all again, or whether he only had a few days, and whether it was possible that he could change things this time around ...

And above all, he kept thinking, over and over: how could he have _not noticed?_

How had he _missed_ it, he wondered a dozen times a day: those sly, proud little grins Yondu threw his way when Peter got something right (and half the time for no reason at all that he could figure out); the way that their combat training turned so easily into rough half-hugs; the fiercely defensive body language when they went into the mess hall and Peter was forced to confront a room full of aggressive grown-up space pirates who were three times his size. Peter remembered Yondu just kind of flinging him to the wolves and mostly staying out of the way and making him fight for his place on the crew. But now he was aware of Yondu always kind of hovering around somewhere in the background -- and so was the crew, he thought. 

Lost in his grief for his mother and his world, believing himself utterly alone, and buried in resentment over what he _thought_ had happened (some asshole pirate abducting him from Earth for no damn reason) he'd failed to notice that Yondu was usually just a step or two behind him, body language clearly proclaiming _Mess with my goddamn Terran and get an arrow between the eyes._

And it wasn't just Yondu. The members of the crew who had liked him (and there were a lot more of them than Peter had remembered) had looked out for him too, in their way. They were always slipping him little treats, helping him with his chores, or showing him some new, cool thing around the ship.

It made his chest twist all over again with a grief he thought he'd gotten over -- had hardly even felt before now, if he was going to be honest with himself, swamped as it had been in the tidal wave of Yondu's death. Not all of these men had died in the failed mutiny; many had been lost in various raids over the years, or died in the Battle of Xandar. A space mercenary's life wasn't usually a long one with a good retirement plan. But they were all gone, every last one of them except for Kraglin (who Peter remembered from this time period as an adult, but now realized was really just a kid, probably in his late teens, posturing with a teenager's bravado).

If he really was here, in the past, he could save them all. It was just like that movie he'd seen with his mom all those years ago, the one with the time-traveling car.

... Except no, he couldn't. If that movie had taught him anything, it was that trying to mess with the past could destroy the future, or at least change it irrevocably. If he really _was_ here, making tiny changes might mean he'd never meet Gamora, never know Rocket or Groot, or even wipe them out of existence totally ...

More comforting all around to think that he was merely dreaming while he was comatose in the future. Although, honestly, if he'd been in a coma for this long, it would seem to indicate that something had gone _really_ wrong.

He tried not to think about it, tried to maintain the dual levels of "this isn't real" and "but just in case, I have to act like it is, in case I screw up the future horribly" with a side of "but what if I can save all these people if I just do the right thing?" The end result, he suspected, made him appear scared, quiet, and weird to everyone around him, but it apparently was the right kind of quiet and weird for nine-year-old Quill, because no one really seemed to notice.

Well. No one except Yondu, sort of. At least he didn't think it was his imagination that Yondu kept giving him an occasional thoughtful, examining look when no one else was paying attention.

Yondu was too damn observant for his own good.

Or else he was a figment of Peter's imagination. 

Peter just wished he _knew._

In the meantime, he tried to act the closest he could to what he thought of as normal for nine-year-old him, which he guessed was all right if no one noticed, and he tried really hard not to follow Yondu around like a puppy (though in all fairness, he remembered that he _had_ actually done a fair amount of that when he'd lived through this before).

He was pretty sure he hadn't noticed that at the time, either -- how much time he'd actually _chosen_ to spend around Yondu, when the old jerk wasn't dragging him off for some lesson or other.

Their sparring lessons in particular were an education in a whole new way this time around.

His memories of Yondu teaching him self-defense mainly centered around getting hit, kicked, and knocked down. Except, now that he knew how strong Yondu really was, he was acutely aware of how _gentle_ Yondu was actually being with him -- in a Yondu-ish kind of way. Now that he'd scrapped with other Ravagers as an adult, he recognized how much worse it could have been, and now that he had been in real fights -- now that he'd had to use the skills Yondu had spent so much time teaching him, to save his own life and other people's -- he ... he got it, he got why Yondu had thought this was important and he had an unexpected, deep appreciation of how many patient hours Yondu had spent teaching it to him.

There were still a few old, cold tendrils of resentment curling around his heart, and probably always would be. It had been, in the beginning especially, a miserable and terrifying life for a grieving eight-year-old child. Yondu could've been kinder, could've explained things better (or, hell, explained things at all), could've given him a damn _choice_ about their sparring sessions rather than dragging him off on a regular basis to kick the crap out of him.

But, as an adult who knew a whole lot more about Yondu's past, he understood a lot better just how out of his depth _Yondu_ had been. Yondu didn't know the first thing about being a parent; it wasn't like anyone had ever shown _him_ how to deal with a kid. Everything Yondu knew had been learned at the business end of someone else's fists and feet and much worse punishment devices. By Yondu's standards, he'd been far, far gentler, far more patient than anyone had ever been with him.

He probably had been doing the best he could, Peter thought. And his best wasn't that great, but he really had been trying hard.

And, based on what he'd said at the end, he'd died thinking all he'd ever done was fuck it up.

_You weren't that bad at it,_ Peter wanted desperately to say. _Okay, you weren't that GOOD at it either, but you tried, I can only imagine how hard you tried._

_You taught me to survive, and you saved me from Ego, not just once but twice. You showed me the galaxy. You gave me all of space._

Maybe he could leave a note for Yondu without screwing up the future, he thought. Maybe he could set up a message to be delivered at the right time, 25 years in the future, and explain what was going to happen without screwing up the future too much.

He looked around him at the Ravagers laughing in the mess -- Tullk flinging a friendly arm around Kraglin's skinny shoulders, Gef knocking back a mug of faintly glowing beer ... some of them he liked, some of them he didn't, but he wished someone could tell him how to save this time-capsule world without upsetting the things about the future that mattered most to him.

Always presuming this was real, of course.

If it wasn't, nothing mattered.

But if it was ...

He pressed the heels of his hands painfully into his eyes, started to pull up his Walkman headphones by habit, and then noticed Yondu watching him from across the mess -- an island of stillness among the laughing, carousing pirates around him, as Yondu often was.

Yondu's red eyes met Peter's, and he jerked his head at the corridor outside, then got up and left the mess.

Cautiously, Peter got up and followed him.

He wasn't expecting to be grabbed as soon as he stepped out of the mess, picked up and slammed into the wall. Suddenly he was dangling from Yondu's powerful grip, and the arrow was humming inches from his ear, while Yondu's glowing red eyes glared into his.

"Who the hell are you?" Yondu snarled through his jagged teeth.

"... what?" Peter squeaked. He lashed out with his small legs, but (stupid tiny body!) couldn't do more than poke the toes of his boots against Yondu's well-armored midsection.

"You heard me. Who are you? _What_ are you? I been watchin' you." Yondu punctuated this with a shake. Peter could feel the heat of the arrow against the skin on the side of his face. "You don't move like Quill. You don't fight like Quill. Are you somethin' else, watchin' me out of his eyes?" Yondu shook him again. "What'd you do with the fuckin' _kid_?"

Peter stared at him, not sure what to say, and realized that the younger version of him wouldn't even have recognized the concern, the _fear,_ in Yondu's eyes, all of those raging emotions, all of that frustrated, furious _love_ hidden underneath the anger layered on top of it.

And then he became aware of a strange, heavy tingling in his fingertips, the way it felt to wake up from deep sleep.

_No! Not now!_

"You're right," he gasped out. "I'm not Peter, not the Peter you know -- hey, _stop_ that, you enormous blue doofus," he snapped as the arrow's point hummed painfully close to his ear. "I'm not _your_ Peter but I'm _a_ Peter, and --" The tingling was growing stronger, his whole body feeling heavy and dead, like he was anchored to it by only the most tenuous of threads. "-- and in a minute, it's gonna be the kid again, I think, and you'd better not scare him out of his wits if he comes around with you shaking him, you asshole. Just be nicer to him, okay? He really loves you --" Surprise flashed in Yondu's eyes. "Yes, he does. Even _he_ doesn't know it, but he does, so try to hit him a little less, because you're actually a pretty decent dad underneath all of it, when you're not being a total jerk, that is --" God, that hadn't come out right, but what to say? How could he cram everything, all those unspoken words, into what he sensed was fast-dwindling time? The tingling had spread up his arms to his shoulders; he couldn't feel his feet anymore. The room seemed to be growing darker, but Yondu's incredulous red eyes were still bright, fixed on his with open bafflement.

The kid in the movie with the time-traveling car had tried to save his friend, Peter remembered. And it had worked. That fictional kid had found the right things to say in time. 

The words spilled out of him, laced with a desperate hope. He didn't care about the future anymore. The future could -- _would_ \-- fix itself. All he cared about was fixing this one part of it.

"-- and carry a spacesuit with you all the time, okay? Because, because it's just a good safety precaution, you never know when you might be shoved out an airlock or something --"

Darkness closed around him. The last thing he saw was Yondu's red eyes, fading, blinking out -- and his last thoughts were of the _last_ time he'd looked into Yondu's eyes like that, watching the life go out of them in deep space.

 

***

 

He came around this time to the most welcome sight in the world: Gamora's face above his.

"Peter," she gasped, and bent down to rest her forehead briefly against his.

"Hi," Peter murmured. He raised an experimental arm. It felt a little bit weak and limp, but not too bad, so he squished her in a test-hug. She pressed the side of her face against his and slid a strong arm behind his neck to hug him back.

"Uh, how long was I out?" he murmured into her hair.

"Too damn long," said a raspy voice that was no part of where -- when -- he'd thought he was. Peter jerked all over, flinching in Gamora's arms.

He pushed Gamora away weakly and she moved back to let him sit up. Peter stared across the room -- some kind of stone chamber, he noted with a vaguely observant part of his brain -- at Yondu leaning against the doorway. 

Yondu was casually dressed in some kind of sleeveless, dark-colored tunic, and that was seven shades of wrong, because Yondu hated people seeing him with his arms bare -- hated the scars being on display. The tunic did have a little Ravager flame patch on the chest, though.

"To answer your question," Gamora said, drawing Peter's dazed attention back to her, "you were out for two days. We were afraid to take you too far away for fear we'd break some kind of connection and hurt you, so we're still here on Besaruu."

"Uh ..." Peter glanced back at Yondu. He was still there. Still bare-armed. Still looking at Peter with a kind of wry, relieved amusement. "You, uh ... see him, right?"

"Who?" Yondu and Gamora said in perfect unison.

Just then Rocket appeared in the doorway behind Yondu. "Move, asshole," he snapped, shoving Yondu's leg unceremoniously to get him out of the way. "Gamora, I think I got an idea for how we might be able to -- Oh, hey, _never mind,_ why didn't any a' you jerks tell me Quill was awake?"

"Because he just woke up," Gamora said, sitting beside Peter on what turned out to be a sort of makeshift bed, a pallet on the floor.

Peter had managed to stop staring at Yondu, in particular because Yondu's presence here was starting to slowly make sense. Because he remembered how it had happened, in a vague kind of way, overlaid with the other memories. Yondu'd had a spacesuit too, hadn't he? Of course he had. Because that was one thing that Peter had known ever since he was a kid: Yondu never went anywhere without one, and they'd thought at first that it wasn't going to work, that it had been crushed when they were all flung around while they were fighting Ego, Yondu had really gone to space thinking he didn't have a working spacesuit because he was a _total asshole_ , but then it did work after all ...

And he remembered the way they'd awkwardly learned to deal with each other again on the Quadrant, and Yondu and Kraglin going off for awhile to try to patch things up with Stakar's bunch, and the way they were putting together their own crew again, but kept dropping in to do jobs with Peter and the Guardians, all casual-like, as if they had nowhere else to be except wherever Peter was ...

And he also remembered crying his eyes out on late shifts on the Quadrant's flight deck, clutching the Zune and staring out at the stars -- he remembered the feeling of Yondu's frozen coat cracking under his clutching hands, and he remembered punching the walls until his knuckles bled because he was _so angry_ at that blue motherfucker for dropping that kind of truth bomb on him and then leaving like that ...

Two sets of conflicting memories. One Peter who'd never known exactly how much he loved Yondu, or how much Yondu loved him, because some things you never _could_ quite know until someone had thrown themselves into deep space for you, and you'd lost them -- and because it was a lot easier to have a relationship with a sometimes-abusive space dad when he was a beloved memory rather than an actual living asshole that you still had to deal with --

\-- and one Peter who'd gained all that knowledge by having his heart broken into a thousand pieces, and would gladly give it up to learn, instead, how to struggle with the apparently somewhat conflicted relationship they had here -- but at least they _had_ a relationship, at least Yondu was alive to have a relationship _with_ \--

"The crystal," Peter said hoarsely.

"It crumbled on contact with the air," Gamora said, making him jump a little. Even though she was still holding his hand, he'd almost forgotten she was there. "We think the explosion that knocked you out might have been part of that reaction, but we're not sure, since there wasn't much left for Rocket to examine. We don't even know what it was made of."

"So much for a three-hundred-thousand-unit score," Rocket grumbled, hopping up on the pallet beside Peter and pressing something with a digital readout against his upper arm. "Nice going, Quill."

"Blame me, why don't you," Peter said automatically, but his gaze kept seeking out Yondu, like he'd vanish if Peter took his eyes off him for a moment. Yondu still had that wryly amused look, but when Peter met his eyes, it turned into an ever-so-slightly more genuine smile.

"Do we know what the crystal was supposed to do?" Peter asked, sitting back as Rocket took his vitals and trying not to keep staring at Yondu.

"Well, we'll never know now, because someone broke it," Rocket said absently, staring at his readouts. "Huh, looks like you're perfectly healthy, 'cept for being asleep for two days."

Peter's stomach picked that moment to growl.

"And hungry," he managed with a weak laugh, and Gamora kissed his cheek.

 

***

 

He caught up to Yondu later, outside the ruins on a flat plain where Yondu and Kraglin's M-ship was parked beside the Milano.

"Yeah?" Yondu said, turning back, hands hooked in his belt. He was wearing heavy sleeves and the leather coat again, looking every inch the space pirate Peter remembered. Like he'd never died. 

Because of course he hadn't, here. Not anymore.

And Peter could already feel himself sinking back into a kind of wary defensiveness, because a few minutes of clinging to each other in space wasn't enough to erase a lifetime's habits. Not here, not in a world where they hadn't both been torn down to the very core of what they were to each other -- not in a world where he hadn't gone through six months of grief. 

"You gonna take off again?" he asked, neutrally.

"Ravager ship don't run itself."

Peter looked at him, and because there was still a part of him who remembered what it was to have all those unspoken, never-to-be-spoken words choking him (not yet overwritten by this world's Peter, not yet, not quite, maybe not ever), he said quietly, "Stay for a little while. Let's hang out. I miss you when you're gone."

Startlement flicked across Yondu's face, quick as light. They just didn't _say_ things like that to each other.

Peter braced himself for arguments, but instead, the surprise gave way to a quick, sharp smile, and Yondu said, "Sure, what the hell. Ain't got no jobs lined up for a while. Heck, why don't you an' your crew come back, see my new ship? Meet the boys. An' a few gals, this time. Aleta's been helpin' with the recruitin'."

"Well, you can use all the help you can get," Peter said, falling back on old (new) habits, and Yondu laughed.


End file.
